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Wiley Encyclopedia of Management: Strategic Management Volume 12

Book · January 2015

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Tanya Sammut-Bonnici John McGee

University of Malta The University of Warwick
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 Preface

As editors of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Management 3e, Vol. 12 Strategic Management, we aim to
provide business practitioners, academics, and students of the field with a comprehensive reference
relating to strategy concepts, methods, and techniques to reflect the dynamism of industry practice
and academic knowledge. The juxtaposition of concepts, methods and techniques reflects the need for
clarity in strategic thought as well as practicality in strategy implementation. As an encyclopedia, this
volume provides a broad coverage of the field and an accessible framework for investigating its subject
matter. The Strategic Management volume has been compiled through a collaborative network of
over 50 professors and industry leaders from universities, business schools, and business organizations
from all parts of the globe. The result is a contemporary, dynamic, and global view of strategy, which
represents cutting edge thinking in the world of corporate and societal management.
The text is designed to be accessible to readers from different backgrounds who contribute to the
design, implementation, and use of strategy at various levels in their organizations. The ease of access to
the wealth of information embodied in the encyclopedia is made possible through the modular nature
of the publication whereby each strategy concept can be searched online and retrieved separately.
We developed a comprehensive list of contemporary strategy topics for the third edition by looking
at research published over the past decade in top academic journals, reputable industry publications,
and the dominant logic of the frameworks of strategy in academic textbooks. We then organized these
topics into distinct strategy themes to enable individual topics to be related to broader streams of
strategic thought. The result was a significantly updated list of topics from previous editions, made
up of 210 topics, 36 of which are new additions with most of the remainder being heavily revised.
The new entries come mainly from the rapidly evolving nature of strategy as reflected in the content
of popular textbooks on strategy and new approaches to strategic leadership advocated in business
schools.
There are three distinct fields that are attracting more attention in the field of strategy, which may
not constitute a new core but will certainly enrich the way we think about strategy. The new themes
revolve around three areas: complex behavior in organizations and industries, the psychological foundations
of strategy, and strategic innovation as an area that focuses on the renewal of managerial cognition and on
the responses of organizations and industries to contentious and difficult environments. Another area
that has gained more citations and more interest from academics and executives in the past few years is
cooperation and collaboration, which is being linked to our understanding of complex adaptive behavior.
The evolution of the key terms and concepts in the encyclopedia reflects a move toward organizational
strategies and resource-based views that have emerged in response to competition, regulation, social
trends, and technological innovation.
Our approach to building this compendium of strategic management is both conceptual and prac-
tical. Strategic management is a performance-driven discipline, with an ingrained competitive stance,
that sets out to condition long-term futures. With this mindset in place, one of the major shifts in
strategic thinking has been to recognize the centrality of resources and capabilities as the founda-
tion of long-term superior results and the need to create and execute strategic plans that utilize these
resources. Therefore, the resource-based view has a much more significant influence in the field of
Wiley Encyclopedia of Management, edited by Professor Sir Cary L Cooper.
Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ii Preface
strategy. The practicalities of how the resource-based view can be captured into workable core compe-
tences and later on into dynamic capabilities that outpace the competition, will be on center stage in
the foreseeable future. The nature of dynamic capabilities links back to complex adaptive behavior, a
field that is yet to evolve into a robust practical toolbox for strategic decision makers.
The third edition is being published in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, a crisis that has
shattered many comfortable illusions about the stability of the global economy and the health and
resilience of many important parts of it. The year 2014 also marks a point at which the long period
of globalization and intensive technological change can be observed in new structures and strategies
around the world, both political and corporate. Thus the context of the field of strategy has changed
immensely and we ought to ask if it has changed the nature of strategic thinking itself.
The most obvious observation to make is that the nature and importance of competition has been
clearly intensified. Falling real incomes have created more demand for low price offerings and differen-
tiated offerings have to show their value proposition more clearly. Everything we know about competi-
tion is in many senses reinforced with an override that observes that time horizons have become more
compressed, strategies need to pay off earlier, and value propositions will have to be readjusted more
frequently.
This raises a more complex point. The tension between short-term and long-term thinking has
been greatly exacerbated. The 2008 crisis pointed toward rapid financial readjustments, the primacy
of cost-driven survival strategies and simultaneously the need for longer term repositioning so as to
be able to create the resources and flexibility for strategies to be more reactive, more adaptive and yet
more durable. Are we to see more trade-offs toward the short term or do we take from 2008 that more
importance should be given to long-term durability?
Part of the long-term thinking of corporations is investment and technological change. The invasion
of consumer buying habits by innovations such as social networks is provoking fundamental changes in
retailing and in consumer goods marketing with consequent implications for investment back down the
supply chain. The pace of technical change and consumer buying habits shows no sign of diminishing.
As further fuel to these changes, the significance of emerging markets has been very evident in the
aftermath of 2008 with considerable visibility of China’s development into a world economic super-
power (or is it going to run into bottleneck constraints and revert to more normal growth). Alongside
this strand of thinking is a rethinking of globalization as a strategy. The emphasis is now on regional
power coupled with increasing free trade. This is a more intricate paradigm than global standardization
requiring correspondingly more complex patterns of internationalization.
So change is even more positively on the agenda and the capacity to interpret and respond to
contextual shifts and rapidly evolving new competitors will become a requisite core competence.
Fundamentally, strategic advantage in any and all contexts is driven and fueled by the resources and
capabilities of firms. The resource-based view is gaining more attention and will gain more traction in
reality as firms begin to work out how to define, measure, and create core competences. The resource-
based view is a theory waiting for major practical advancement. Without core competences, firms
are destined to be price competitors or at best rapid imitators. Long-term superior performance will
accrue to those who know what are their strategic assets.
The principle focus of strategy regarding the creation of wealth will continue to dominate and will
remain critical to the competitive survival of firms. However, the definition of wealth in the economic
literature is starting to shift toward a more holistic view that integrates financial and societal well-
being – a reflection probably of broader public opinion. The effect on the field of strategy is an increase
in importance of areas such as corporate social responsibility as well as providing ammunition for the
need for organizations to take an even longer view in spite of current short-term financial pressures.
The implementation of strategy is an area that requires more attention in terms of providing a working
framework of how to execute the wide variety of strategic models available in the literature. Implemen-
tation remains a minefield of mobilising financial, human, organizational and social capital, in the form
of industry networks.
 Preface iii
Strategic Management Vol. 12 is a rich collection of the latest thinking on strategic management.
We are indebted to our colleagues in international business schools and corporations across the globe,
who have contributed with their ideas, opinions, best practices, and latest research finding. It has been
a privilege to be part of this great network of strategic minds that have created this comprehensive
collection of strategic management concepts.
John McGee and Tanya Sammut-Bonnici

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